Preventing Concussions

A new study linking frequent heading of a soccer ball with changes to the white matter of the brain and poorer performance on a neurocognitive test of memoryis likely to add fuel to the fire of a 30-year-old debate about the effects of heading.

Brain trauma to youth and high school players in contact and collision sports can occur not just from violent helmet-on-helmet collisions but from repetitive sub-concussive blows. There are five major ways to reduce exposure to such hits, experts say.

Brain trauma among football players may be less the result of violent helmet-on-helmet collisions that cause concussions as the accumulation of sub-concussive blows. The long-term effects of such repetitive brain trauma are still unknown.

Preventing serious injury (concussion, traumatic brain injury, spinal
paralysis) or death in high school and Pop Warner football; advice from
the National Center for Catastrophic Sports Injury Researc on football
safety

Each year, almost 87,000 hockey-related injuries to youths under age 15 are treated in hospitals, doctors' offices, clinics, ambulatory surgery centers and hospital emergency rooms. The total cost of these hockey-related injuries was more than $978 million in 2006. This amount includes medical, legal and liability, work loss, and pain and suffering costs.

Engaging in a 5-minute helmetless tackling drill twice a week during pre-season football and once a week during the season reduced by almost a third the frequency of impacts to the head over the course of a single season, reports a groundbreaking new study.

A longtime law professor and youth hockey coach argues that national, state, and local programs designed to prevent concussions are preferable to litigation because they are proactive, not reactive.
40 years, and I coached youth ice hockey for 42 years. My experiences teach me that prevention efforts must remain the primary strategy to meet the youth sports concussion crisis, not litigation. The reason is that prevention is proactive; litigation is mostly reactive.

Last month, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) endorsed efforts to limit
contact practices in youth football, but declined to make a clear
recommendation in favor of delaying the age at which tackling is introduced.
The AAP likewise refused to support those calling for an outright ban on
tackling in football for athletes below age 18, unwilling to recommend at this
time such a fundamental change in the way the game is played.

As someone who has been working for 15 years to make youth football safer, MomsTEAM's Executive Director was glad to see the nation's largest and most prestigious pediatrics group support so many of the evidence- and expert consensus-based recommendations MomsTEAM has been making to improve the safety of the game.

The November 2015 announcement by a group of US youth soccer groups of a recommendation that players age 11 and younger be barred from heading the ball and that headers be limited in practice for those from age 12 and 13, has generated controversy, with experts lining up on both sides of the debate.